Saturday, October 27, 2012

Last March, American toy maker Mattel closed its first flagship Barbie store – the House of Barbie – in Shanghai after two years struggling since opening in 2009. Mattel invested over $30 million in the House of Barbie in celebration of the American iconic doll’s 50th anniversary.

Why?

Second, Mattel didn’t quite understand what Chinese girls and young women want. The Chinese concept of “femininity” is very different from that of American. In China, “feminine” is more about sweet and soft rather than smart and strong, more about gentle and loving rather than dazzling and fashion-forward. Although it has created a Chinese Barbie Ling with black hair who wears Chinese attire, Mattel failed to understand what Ling would represent in order to appeal to Chinese girls.

Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.

The Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the legal and operational details of its targeted-killing program. Behind closed doors, painstaking debates precede each decision to place an individual in the cross hairs of the United States’ perpetual war against al-Qaeda and its allies.

Increasingly, the orders to find, track or kill those people are delivered to Camp Lemonnier. Virtually the entire 500-acre camp is dedicated to counterterrorism, making it the only installation of its kind in the Pentagon’s global network of bases.